On Thursday, I went ahead and ordered Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game. I liked it so much when I played it that I just couldn’t resist. It’s slated to arrive on Tuesday, and I’ve already got plans to play it with a friend on Wednesday. Awesome.

I mentioned yesterday that Wizards had created Tiny Adventures, a D&D app for Facebook. I also mentioned that it was a bit buggy; specifically, adventures were not updating for me, and I kept on getting errors. Well, here’s the response that Wizards posted to yesterday’s antics, and it is awesome:

5pm Thursday, August 21st

Your Server was exploring the dungeon and preparing to battle the mighty dragon when it encountered a horde of good-looking, expert Tiny Adventure players.

Your Server made a server load check with a difficulty of 3700 . . . and rolled 1

Your Server was dominated by the exited players and its CPU was trampled. Your Server headed back to the shop to purchase a huge upgrade for itself and will be back tomorrow. The horde of players was thanked again for their enthusiasm and patience.

Please check back tomorrow afternoon (Friday August 22nd).

I’ll be checking back later today, in the hopes that I can actually try it out. It really does sound like a cool little diversion.

I went out for a marathon gaming session last night, and managed to play four games, two of which I’d played before. In the order that I played them:

Settlers of Catan was the first game I played, and it was the second time I had played it. It was fun. I like the strategy of the game; even if you’re unfamiliar with it, strategies have a way of revealing themselves to you as you play. I got a settlement near some sheep early on, and also got a sheep-trading port. Through some lucky die rolls, I wound up getting tons and tons of sheep, which I promptly traded for resources that I needed more. I feel like maybe I should have bought a few more development cards, and I ultimately lost, but I had fun and I’d like to play again.

The Great Brain Robbery is a game that I actually own, and have played a couple of times before. It’s a fun diversion about zombies in the wild west robbing a passenger train full of government cheese (as zombies sometimes do). I like the game, but I think I’d get pretty tired of it if I played it too much. Still, it was a fun time.

Royal Turf is a game about betting on horse racing. I wasn’t that enthusiastic about it at first, but it actually turned out to be a good little game. There’s a significant luck component with the racing of the actual horses, as well as some strategy and bluffing involved with the actual betting. Do you bet on the stable horse, or the crazy horse? Should you bet on the horse in first position, or maybe one further back that’s a bit faster sometimes?

The highlight of the night, however, was Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game, which we played twice. I’ve been wanting to play this game for a while now, and I was extremely excited to actually get to. On the first play through we had the full six players (two zombie players and four hero players); I played on the side of the heroes. We played the “Save the Townsfolk” scenario, in which the heroes have to survive the night with at least four townsfolk cards between them. We won, primarily I think because the zombies made some tactical errors (which was probably because nobody had ever played the game before), in that the horded their cards. Card-hording is a great strategy if you’re a hero, but for zombies, you generally want to use as many of your cards as you possibly can every turn, because your hand will be fully replenished at the beginning of your next turn.

In the second game we only had three players. I played as the zombies, while my to friends played as two heroes each. This game, I think, was more satisfying because we were more used to the rules. It was definitely more of a challenge for the heroes. We played the “Escape in the Truck” scenario, which encourages holing up in one location a lot less than “Save the Townsfolk” does. Also unlike the first scenario, if the time limit runs out, the zombies win rather than the heroes winning, so the heroes are fighting the clock. I had some good spawning rolls in the beginning, and wound up with my full compliment of zombies by the second or third round. I also burned through my cards as quickly as I could, and discarded cards that I couldn’t use immediately, and I think that helped a lot. There was one rule that I think we played incorrectly. According to the rules, I believe, any time a hero player loses his last hero, that hero returns as a zombie hero. We were playing such that every hero death resulted in a zombie hero, which I think was incorrect with two hero players (but would have been correct with four). I’m not entirely sure it influenced the outcome of the game, as there are numerous cards that I discarded that would have possibly netted me zombie heroes anyway, and I was killing heroes off at a prodigious rate without a lot of help from my zombie heroes. In the beginning, it seemed that the heroes might win, because the drew Keys and Gasoline right away (both items that they needed to bring to the truck in order to escape). However, I had some lucky card draws and managed to mob the truck and drive the heroes with the pertinent items into a building, then proceeded to corner them and kill them off one by one, forcing them to discard their keys and gasoline. In the end, I won because the round limit expired before the heroes could escape. We had also managed to go through every single hero character, with only two remaining heroes at the end of the game. It was a very good time, and I fully intend to buy this game as soon as I can; I can’t wait to play it again.

Okay, so Wizards of the Coast has created a D&D Facebook app. It seems interesting, if a little buggy and slow. If you’re signed up on Facebook, you might want to go check it out. If you’re not, maybe this will get you to sign up.

Followup: Michael Goldfarb apologized for his remarks today. While the apology does not immediately strike me as being all that sincere, I’ve decided that, since intent and tone is hard to read on the Internet, I’ll take it at face value and accept the apology. Hopefully this is the last time I’ll feel moved to blog about politics. That is, until one of the candidates tells us all to get out of our parents’ basements and vote.

. . . they remind me that they can still be fun.

I try to keep politics out of this blog, because honestly it has no place here. But they threw the first stone. From John McCain’s website:

“It may be typical of the pro-Obama Dungeons & Dragons crowd to disparage a fellow countryman’s memory of war from the comfort of mom’s basement, but most Americans have the humility and gratitude to respect and learn from the memories of men who suffered on behalf of others.”

Without talking about my political affiliation one way or another, let’s just say that, if McCain ever had my vote, he no longer does. My hobby is not a punchline, nor is it an epithet. Way to alienate voters, Senator.

I’ll start with The Dark Knight. I saw it last night, and it was fantastic. Lots of great characters and a well-written storyline, as well as some nice action sequences. I must say, though, that the Joker stole every scene he was in; he was easily the strongest, most interesting character in the movie, so I guess it’s a good thing that he’s a major part of it, too. My one real complaint about the movie was that Batman simply wasn’t as interesting as he was in Batman Begins. There was less of that barely-controlled rage that made him such a cool anti-hero, although he did have to make some very tough, anti-hero-ish choices in this one. Anyway, it’s not really a major complaint; he’s still pretty cool, and it didn’t really detract from my enjoyment of the movie.

On to gaming. I went to a gaming club with my friend Chris on Wednesday, and I played three very cool games. First, we played Instinct, a game that Wizards of the Coast published when Magic: The Gathering was at its height. It’s a trick-taking card game, similar to Spades, but somewhat more strategic. In Instinct, once you’ve seen your hand, you bid on how many tricks you’re going to take. In order to get any points at all, you have to hit your bid exactly, and the harder your bid is to hit, the more points you get (so it can actually be more valuable to bid zero and take no tricks than to bid three, because three is generally easier to hit than zero). Unfortunately, this one’s out of print, so you’ll have to rely on eBay if you want it.

After that, we played a game called Psychiatrist, which requires no pieces or other components to play. In fact, it may have been made up by someone at the club, for all I know. In Psychiatrist, one or two people are designated as psychiatrists and are sent out of the room. The rest of the group (the patients) then decide upon a rule that they will follow while answering the psychiatrists’ questions. In the first game we played, our rule was that, if the psychiatrists asked a yes-no question, the person to the left of the patient who answered had leprosy; if another kind of question was asked, the person to the right had leprosy. In the second game, the patients could only speak in four-word sentences. It is then the psychiatrists’ job to ask questions in order to figure out what the rule is. A psychiatrist can ask a rules question, to which the rules do not apply, provided he/she does not simply ask what the rule is. There is no limit on how many questions of whichever type (rules or non-rules) can be asked. Also, if at any point a patient violates the rule, the other patients are supposed to shout “Psychiatrist!”, and everyone switches seats. It’s a fun party game, with no purchase required!

The last game we played, and probably my favorite of the night, was Once Upon a Time. In this card game, all players collaborate to tell a fairy tale. You have cards that are elements of a fairy tale, such as “A Prince”, “A Fairy”, “Night Time”, or “This Item Can Talk”. As you narrate, you play your cards, narrating each one in such that it is important to the story. There was a general rule during our play that you had to spend at least a few sentences on each card before playing another one. When you’ve played your last card, you can then try to play your ending card, provided you can narrate it in such a way that it makes sense. When this happens, you win. The wrinkles come in with all the opportunities that your fellow players have to interrupt you. There are specific interrupt cards that can be played on types of cards, such as Items, Aspects, or People. In addition, if you narrate in an element of the story and somebody else has a card that matches that element, they can play it immediately to interrupt you and take control of the narrative. There are also rules for what happens if you stumble over the story for too long, or if you create a paradox within the narrative. The game is a little bit intimidating at first; I didn’t play many cards during our first game. However, once we got into the second game I was already into it, and I wound up winning (a giant saved the day when a shifty fairy tried to cast a spell over a village). Our third game actually had us going through the entire deck, and featured a giantess who was the daughter of the evil king, a heroic accountant, and another shifty fairy who wound up casting a spell to kill everyone in the world, then bringing individuals back to life when it suited her.

Yesterday, I ran a solo session for the one player who wasn’t able to make it to the first session. Now he’s got comparable experience to the others, and he’s actually in Winterhaven, which makes things easier. Anway:

Session Two: The Road to Winterhaven

As a long-time DM, I’m always on the lookout for tools and such that make my job a little bit easier. Since I really haven’t shared all this stuff with you guys yet, I figured I would. Most of this stuff is relatively inexpensive, if not downright free. Some of it is designed for RPGs some of it is not, but can be used for such. Anyway, in no particular order:

• Wizards of the Coast actually puts out some quality products that I use, and I would be remiss if I didn’t at least give them a mention on this post. First is their line of Dungeon Tiles, which are excellent. They feature good artwork, clean, easy to see and use, 1-inch grids, they’re modular, and they’re somewhat dry-erasable. Also, they’re only $10 a pop, which is nice. One caveat: I say they’re somewhat dry-erasable because I’ve got a few tiles with what seem like permanent marks from dry-erase ink that sat on the tile too long. So be careful. That said, if you find yourself having to replace some tiles, they’re not that expensive. Also useful if you use Dungeon Tiles is Jai’s Dungeon Tile Mapper, a free program for creating DT-based maps on your computer. It’s basically the same program that Wizards hosts, except that it’s actually been updated since the third DT set came out; the only one currently missing is the newest one, Hall of the Giant Kings, which may be added soon.
• Also by Wizards is their line of D&D Miniatures, which I am a recent enthusiast and collector of. Booster packs are reasonably priced, and are even more so if you shop around a little bit, but are randomized. If you want specific, individual minis, Paizo.com is a good resource, as is ebay.
• But what if you don’t want to drop all that money on minis? What if you need a mini that doesn’t exist, is hard to get, or you can’t wait for it to ship because you’re playing tomorrow? Cardboard counters are a good way to go. I usually make my own, printed on card stock, which is pretty cheap at Staples and other office stores. As far as images for said counters, there are a number of good resources available. Wizards hosts a number of character portraits, as well as a multitude of images from their catalog of products that can be chopped up in your favorite image editing software. You could also check out these D&D counters. Finally, the art forum on EN World is a fantastic resource for all kinds of RPG-related artwork; of particular note is Storn’s thread, not only because his artwork is excellent but because it’s all released under a Creative Commons license. Beware, though; EN World can sometimes run a little slow due to their massive server load.
• Another thing that’s often required for D&D (especially under 4th Edition) is small counters and beads of various descriptions to keep track of conditions like marked, cursed, bloodied, and others. You could go to a gaming store, but you could also go someplace like AC Moore or Jo-Ann Fabrics. They have lots of beads, as well as bead boxes that can be used to store and organize your beads or other things. I use bead boxes to store my Dungeon Tiles, for example.
• Finally, I recently found a website that has all sorts of great stuff, including a nice landscape character sheet, some cards for tracking conditions, and some very nice power and magic item cards (I use the Magic Set Editor, but these are nice too).

I hope this has been helpful to people out there who want to DM, or already do DM. Maybe I saved you some time.